Ruby Flynn (23 page)

‘How? How did books from Ballyford library get here?’

She spoke out loud to the undulating shadows and looked around the room as if expecting an answer, but of course, there was none, only the familiar and eternal roar of the waves crashing against the shore at the bottom of the cliff.

Ruby returned the bike to the stables and rested it against the tack room wall. She hid the books under the hay and would return for them early in the morning. She wanted to take them into the castle when the others were not around. There was no sign of Danny or any of the grooms or garden boys. She wondered should she put the bike back in the loose box, but she knew a litter of puppies had been born a few days before and were nestled in the straw. The staff would all be in the kitchen eating supper and Ruby, feeling hungry herself, hoped Amy would have saved her some.

As she passed the stable door the chestnut mare lifted her head from the manger and, with her ears pricked, snorted a greeting to Ruby.

‘Are you still filling your belly?’ laughed Ruby, kissing the mare’s warm, velvet muzzle once again. Ending her day where it had begun. ‘If Amy hasn’t kept me any food, I’ll be in here to join you.’

As Ruby gently stroked the white blaze on the mare’s brow, she became aware that she was not alone. Someone was watching her and listening.

Feeling self-conscious her back stiffened and she turned to see if it was Danny, returning to the stable. Maybe he had heard her and wanted to put the precious bike away himself. Check that she hadn’t caused any damage. But as the shadow moved away from the darkness of the kitchen garden wall opposite the stable, she saw that it wasn’t Danny. It was Lord Charles.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said quickly, to reassure her. ‘I didn’t want to frighten you. I was in my study and I saw you cycle up the drive.’

He dropped his gaze and put his hands in his pockets. He looked uncomfortable. Ruby realized that he was waiting for her to speak.

‘It is nearly dark,’ she whispered, although no one would hear her. She hadn’t whispered deliberately, her voice had failed her.

‘Yes, it is. You are lucky to have made it. You took a risk there.’ He lifted his head and smiled at her. The effect on her was so strong she thought she would faint. The air was filled with the heady smell of ocean night air and sweet hay, and she took a deep breath to steady her voice.

‘I know, I’m sorry. I took longer than I thought I would.’

‘Did you see the clerk? Did you knock on his door?’ he asked her. ‘I telephoned to let him know that you might.’

Ruby could hardly believe what she was hearing. He had done that for her? He had given her the bike, a day off and even telephoned Con? She was wholly unused to such acts of kindness. Her reaction to his words, her feelings of pleasure and gratitude for an act of kindness were familiar, like long lost friends returning.

‘I saw them leaving church, before I went up to the house. I didn’t know what to say to them. I wasn’t sure if I would be welcome…’

Her voice trailed off. She felt ridiculous. He had gone to all that trouble and she hadn’t been brave enough to introduce herself.

‘Well, that’s not a problem, is it? As long as you saw them. Maybe next time you could say hello. How was the house? I wondered how you would manage, with it having been empty for so long.’

Ruby leaned against the stable wall. She needed something to support and steady her. Lord Charles, a grown man, appeared to want to talk to her but Ruby was unused to talking to someone to whom her words mattered. She had to be careful now, every word she spoke was important because it would create an impression and she desperately wanted that impression to be a good one. She wanted him to like her.

He was older than she was and yet he also appeared so young. She studied his hair. It was thick, golden and fell across his forehead as he kicked the earth with the toe of his boot. He smiled at her again. ‘I half thought you might not come back. That you would have some crazy idea to stay in Doohoma.’

Ruby felt her cheeks burn. How did he know? She was aware that they both shared something many others did not. They knew the deep pain of loss and they both also knew how it set them apart, made them different from others. Ruby knew it formed the basis of her relationship with Lady Isobel, even though the lady was from a very different upbringing.

‘Was everything inside the house as you expected?’ He spoke again and she knew that she had been staring at him and dragged her eyes away.

‘There was never much in there,’ she half laughed. ‘It was more, well, I suppose the memories.’ She looked back at him sheepishly and then at the floor. She had no idea what the boundaries of this conversation might be. Was she expected to answer honestly, or to just listen and reply with single word answers? Was this a master–servant conversation or did Lord Charles really want to talk to her?

‘It is the memories which are the worst,’ he murmured.

‘Yes, you are right. I will be honest with you, it wasn’t my plan to return to Ballyford tonight,’ she said boldly. ‘I had intended to run away. But I would have returned the bike...’ Her voice trailed away. Her words sounded ridiculous even to herself.

‘Ah, but if I’m not mistaken, it’s here that you belong, that’s how you feel, isn’t it Ruby? What changed your mind?’

His heart beat rapidly while he waited for her reply. He knew it was beyond comprehension, but he wanted her answer to include him. For him to have been a reason, or even part of a reason, for Ruby’s return.

‘I couldn’t pedal back fast enough,’ she said looking down at her hands, which she clasped and held in front of her. ‘I felt driven away by the memories. They were too much for me. They all came at once and they, they…’ Her voice trailed off again as she searched for the words.

‘They swamped you,’ he said. ‘They swamped you and then you wanted to run away, to a different life and for you, the different life was here, at Ballyford.’

Ruby’s jaw fell open. That was exactly what had happened.

Words, at first slow and hesitant, now began to pour out. He had sought her out and spoken to her about her deepest, most personal secrets. She would speak to him as though she were his equal. She could tell that it was what he wanted.

‘I could hear my mammy’s voice, I even half expected to smell the dinner cooking in the pot hanging over the fire. It sounds insane, I know, but it was all there, everything, and I realized I didn’t really want to be there. I wanted to come back, because being there meant facing it all over again and I didn’t want to do that, really. At least here at Ballyford there’s lots to distract me. Work to do and people who don’t ask me awkward questions. People who know nothing, and you know in that there is some comfort, peace even. I can hide away.’

She lifted her head, boldly, to look directly at him, and to her dismay she thought she saw tears in his eyes. She couldn’t be sure. The only light came from the library window above them, but she was almost certain.

‘I know how that feels, Ruby,’ he said quietly, ‘wanting to run away from the place which holds the best and the worst of memories. I know just how that feels.’

Ruby felt an overwhelming longing to comfort him. To stretch out her arms and cradle him to her, to kiss the lines from his troubled brow. She breathed in deeply. It was an urge she had to suppress. His wife was her mistress, waiting for her in the nursery. It was her she had to return to, not him. She suddenly felt sick with guilt, disloyalty even, and yet all she had done was talk. It was the feelings she had towards him that made her feel troubled though she didn’t even know what they truly were.

‘I have to get back to Lady Isobel,’ she said reluctantly.

‘Yes, of course, off you go,’ he replied, as though dismissing her somewhat impatiently.

She counted to three in her head. She had to walk normally. Pushing herself away from the stable wall, she stood upright. ‘It’s getting cold out here, are you coming inside yourself?’ she said.

‘I will in a moment, I will just stay and chat to the mare for a while. Sometimes she speaks more sense than I do.’

Then, for one fleeting moment, he reached out and lifted her hand. He placed his palm against hers and pressed, fusing the two together, and then he let her hand drop as though it had scorched him. They both stood for a moment, framed still in the glare of the moonlight, before she turned away from him and ran into the castle.

‘Is there any possibility that I might be fed anytime soon? Before I starve to death?’

Mr McKinnon had been good humoured to begin with, but as the preparations for the ball gathered momentum, he grew more and more exasperated by the disruption to the quiet and steady routine he had become used to during the barren and miserable years which followed the deaths of the Ballyford heirs.

‘I had forgotten what all this ball malarkey was like,’ he confessed to Amy one evening.

‘Well, I for one am enjoying it,’ Amy replied. ‘What’s all this space for, kitchen maids and pots and pans, the new range the size of Jack’s cart and the like, if all I was using them for was to make the staff dinner? It was madness, Mr McKinnon, and you know it.’

Mr McKinnon carried the decanter of port from the dining table into the kitchen, carefully removed the stopper and laid it on a linen napkin. ‘This won’t keep, I think we had better not waste it, don’t you?’ he said.

Amy grinned and held out her glass.

‘Aye, I do agree with you, Amy, it went on for a bit too long, the sadness and all. I remember Mrs McKinnon saying that if the curtains remained closed for much longer, we would all be blinded by the daylight when they were drawn back. All the same, I hope you’re ready for it all to calm down again, once Lord FitzDeane returns to Liverpool. He’s asked Mrs McKinnon to travel with him after the ball is over and to stay for a week or two, to staff up the Sefton Park town house and make sure they run it to Ballyford standards. He’s a man of business. He needs more than the castle and the farm. It’s shipping he’s into. He tells me Liverpool looks to America for inspiration and that’s what will secure the future of Ballyford. Personally, I think there is much more to it than that.’

Mrs McKinnon appeared back in the kitchen, after dealing with a spat between two of the garden boys, and dragged her chair closer to the fire to sit with them.

‘Aye, it’s true,’ she said, ‘nothing will turn him away from Liverpool, there’s something dragging him there all right and it’s more powerful than anything any one of us might say to him. He’s asked me to find staff for the house and I was thinking, I might just go back to the convent where we found Ruby and take two of the girls from there. Two will be enough, if one of them can cook.’

Mr McKinnon filled a glass for his wife, while she pushed the chair cushion behind her.

‘God, my back is giving me gyp this week. I know it’s because of all the extra work.’

Amy passed Mrs McKinnon an extra cushion from her own chair. ‘I don’t suppose either of you are going to tell me what the notion is that’s troubling Ruby, are you?’ she said. ‘I’m not daft, you know. I’ve known from the day she arrived that something is going on there. Since when have we had a servant who wasn’t from one of our own tenants’ cottages? God knows, there’s enough to choose from, and since when have we needed someone who could read and write and with such a pretty hand for writing too? No, I know, you two are keeping secrets from me.’

Mr McKinnon inspected some imaginary mud on his shoe. He took the handkerchief out of his pocket and wetting the end with his tongue, bent down to wipe it off.

‘You’ve mud all over your shoes,’ Mrs McKinnon reprimanded her husband, bending down to take a look.

‘I knew it,’ Amy exclaimed, not taken in by their diversionary tactics. ‘Ye shifty pair. Well, I’m waiting, if ye would be so good as to tell me one day, in your own time, mind. In the meantime I’ve enough to be going on with.’

Knowing when she was beaten, Amy changed the subject. ‘I’m baking a cake, the shape of Lord FitzDeane’s new ship it is, and I am icing it from the postcard Mr McKinnon brought me back from Liverpool. Would you both like to see it?’

‘I’ve seen it just now in the cool room. I peeped in on my way back from the stables.’ Mrs McKinnon laughed. ‘’Tis the best cake I have ever laid my eyes upon. How in God’s name you managed to make it all so perfectly shaped, I have no idea. Lord Charles will be thrilled.’

‘Yes,’ Mr McKinnon said, ‘that’s his pride and joy now. He’s very excited about her first voyage from Liverpool, but he is more sorry not to be there. Apparently things are moving much faster than he thought they would. He’s been spending a great deal of time on the telephone to Rory Doyle who will stand in for him at the launch. Our Lord Charles is feeling a little miffed about that, I can tell.’

‘Maybe he’s learning sense then,’ said Mrs McKinnon. ‘There’s nothing I would trust that Rory Doyle with.’

‘Oh, I don’t think it’s trust that’s the issue, Mrs McKinnon, more a general unhappiness that he won’t be there to play his part. I’m most sorry to have to disappoint you on that score. He’s actually looking forward to Rory Doyle’s arrival.’

Mrs McKinnon groaned as Amy’s eyes lit up, but only before a familiar look of pain slipped across her face.

‘That shifty little blighter?’ said Mrs McKinnon. ‘Lord Charles is so soft, sometimes I want to knock his block off. How is it we can tell that Rory Doyle is a con man and Lord Charles can’t?’

‘My job is to watch Lord Charles’s back, even though he doesn’t realize it,’ said Mr McKinnon. ‘If there is anything untoward with Rory, rest assured, I shall surely spot it.’

‘God, you two, you don’t give up do you?’ said Amy as she tipped back her head and downed her drink.

*

‘Do you think maybe Ruby should go to Liverpool?’ asked Mrs McKinnon, after Amy had gone to bed. ‘I’ve noticed Jane has been awful shifty around Ruby. No one is as happy as they once were, not since she arrived.’

‘Taking Ruby to Liverpool to run the house is the best idea you have had all day, Mrs Mack, although Lady Isobel will miss her.’